‘To Make Men Free,’ by Heather Cox Richardson

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By Jonathan Rauch

Jan. 2, 2015

America does not have a broken political system. It has a broken political party: the Republicans.

In 1962, the political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote that parties “perform, to some degree, at least three functions in a democratic government. They recruit candidates, mobilize voters and assemble power within the formal government.” Today’s Republican Party is pretty good at mobilizing voters. But it has ceded much of its control over candidate recruitment to extreme activists who dominate the primaries — activists who often care more about ideological purity than about governing. Ideologues, once in government, proudly ignore the blandishments and threats with which party leaders once induced followers to follow. When House Speaker John Boehner has less sway over his caucus members than they have over him, there is not much he can do to “assemble power.” Unable to make a deal even when doing so would serve the party’s interests, for instance on immigration reform, ­Boehner occupies himself with struggling to manage his unruly caucus and suing President Obama, and the wheels of compromise lose traction as Congress sinks into an ooze of dysfunction. The party establishment is fighting back — with some success. But the outcome remains very much an open question.

Nothing, then, could be more timely than a history of the Republican Party. By reminding us that the party was not always broken, such a history might offer some insight on how to make repairs. As it turns out, however, “To Make Men Free,” by Heather Cox Richardson, only halfway delivers: It is longer on history than insight.

The book begins, as it should, with Abraham Lincoln and his compatriots, who founded the Republican Party amid the wreckage of the short-lived Whigs. The Whigs, in turn, traced their ideological lineage to the Federalists of the founders’ era, and in particular to the big-government conservatism and economic nationalism of Alexander Hamilton. In the founders’ day, Hamilton was fiercely opposed by Thomas Jefferson, who feared self-aggrandizing government and creeping centralization of power. (As president, Jefferson actually governed like a Hamiltonian — but that’s another story.)

From that day to this, the contest between Jefferson and Hamilton has continued; and, to a large extent, it has been waged within the Republican Party. Both sides are conservative. Both support enterprise and economic freedom. Both, unlike the political left, believe that equality comes from freedom, rather than the other way around. But the two factions are at daggers drawn over government’s role, which one side sees as indispensable, the other as insidious.

Richardson, a historian at Boston College, is at her best charting, over a century and a half, the twists and permutations as Republicans of many eras waged their internecine battles. The visionary activism of Lincoln and the Radical Republicans gives way to the laissez-faire, anti-labor ideology of the Gilded Age. Reacting to the political and economic failures of the likes of Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt swings the party back toward Hamiltonian muscularity, a tradition that endures today in the politics of George W. Bush and John McCain. The Jeffersonian wing storms back to power in the 1920s, establishing a counternarrative carried forward by Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and lately the Tea Party — itself partly a reaction to Bush’s Wall Street bailout, Medicare expansion, deficits, wars and other Hamiltonian ventures.

Just at the moment, the Jeffersonians are running riot in the party, aided by the strategic discovery that they can win (as they see it) merely by obstructing. Remember, though, that all of the party’s presidential nominees since 1988 have been closer to the Hamiltonian wing. Concluding her book, Richardson wonders if the Hamilton­ians might yet come out on top. “Forced to adapt to a changing nation,” she muses, “in this century, perhaps, the Republican Party will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders.”

Richardson does less than she might to answer her question, because too often her own ideals get in the way of properly understanding those of the Republicans. She sees Lincoln and his early Republican colleagues as fighting a life-or-death battle against — you were going to say slavery? No: Their preoccupation was with growing economic inequality and the rise of a wealthy oligarchy, which, she believes, the Constitution failed to guard against. “Lincoln asserted that the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution embodied America’s fundamental principle: equality.” Lincoln, in her telling, “founded the Republican Party to guarantee that a few wealthy elites would not control government at the expense of hard workers.”

This is a peculiar reading of Lincoln. The idea that the Constitution was the propertied class’s counterrevolution against the equality-minded Declaration dates back a century, to the historian Charles A. Beard; but it has not worn well, and Lincoln certainly did not subscribe to it. His core value was liberty, which he saw both the Declaration and the Constitution as serving, albeit in different ways. In an 1861 fragment, he likened the Declaration to an “apple of gold,” and the Constitution to a silver picture framing the apple, “made not to conceal, or destroy, the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it.”

He did believe in federal support for education and infrastructure: By making the working man more autonomous and more productive, public investment and public-spirited government activism would promote both freedom and prosperity. Lincoln, Richardson points out, advanced that idea with land-grant colleges, homesteading and the transcontinental railroad; Theodore Roosevelt followed him with antimonopoly suits, railroad regulation and proposals for urban schools and parks; Eisenhower took his turn with the interstate highway system and the creation of the department of health, education and welfare.

Yet each advance by Republican modernizers fomented a backlash from the anti-government wing, whose goal, in Richardson’s telling, was to establish the primacy of property and profits over labor and opportunity. Laissez-faire Republicans, in her view, were (and are) little more than shills for American oligarchs, from the days of the Southern slaveholders down to the present. On her reading, Barry Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative” made the claim, as expressed by Richardson, that “unless voters took the country back to the founding principles of protection of property by a wealthy elite, America would continue to become a totalitarian state.” Conservatives like Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley “promised to turn the clock back to the days before the Civil War.” And so on.

This may be an accurate account of ­limited-government conservatism as seen by Moveon.org or Occupy Wall Street, but it is a distorting lens through which to examine the past. Richardson seems determined to cast the Republican Party’s history as a morality play pitting egalitarian, pro-government good guys against plutocratic, anti-government bad guys. Alas, her insistent reductionism obstructs the much richer, more complex and interesting story that her factual narrative tells when she (too rarely) lets it speak for itself.

And you would never know, reading her book, that there was a serious intellectual case, or indeed any case, for small-­government conservatism. The idea that an overweening federal government is a threat to both freedom and equality (not to mention prosperity) goes back to Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and some other fairly respectable personages. You can disagree with them, or with Coolidge or Reagan or Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or George Will, but to dismiss them as nothing more than mouthpieces of the wealthy and big business is to indulge in the sort of anti-intellectualism that Richardson accuses conservatives of harboring.

“To Make Men Free” proffers a readable and provocative account of the many paths that Republicans have taken to their current state of confusion. Still, it misses an opportunity. Good history is a portal to the past; if only the author had checked her politics at the door.